BI and visualization startup ClearStory Data announces “further” integration of its Spark-based tooling with Cloudera CDH, which will surprise those who thought ClearStory had already integrated with CDH.

It’s not clear what “further” integration means. Integration is like pregnancy; you can’t be a little bit pregnant, and you can’t integrate just a little. ClearStory’s datasheet says it can use Hadoop as a data source without specifying a distribution, which most customers would take to mean it works with CDH.

I suspect that this announcement simply means that ClearStory has certified its software on CDH. Now if they would just get around to certifying on Spark.

Cloudera

VentureBeat reports that Cloudera is worth $5 billion, roughly the same amount of value that Teradata has lost.

By open-sourcing Greenplum and outsourcing Hadoop, Pivotal seems to be trying to move up the stack. That’s a reasonable strategy — it’s doubtful there is a need for another Hadoop distribution, and Pivotal was a marginal player. Greenplum was roadkill in the data warehouse appliance wars, permanently stuck in the Visionary box in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, so open-sourcing makes sense. It’s like donating your old Volvo to charity to take the tax deduction.

But it’s not clear what it is they’re trying to move up to; when the top of your stack is Hawq and a query optimizer, you’re in deep trouble. EMC passed on buying Alpine when it bought Greenplum, which tells me that EMC execs do not “get” business analytics.

Here’s another triumph of packaging: Studebakers badged as Packards.

Predixion Software

After much hoopla about its “D” round, Predixion announces that it has raised $4 million, which is just sad.